Your tech stack is not the product • Hacker News Board

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#21

Post by goodoldneon » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:34 PM UTC

PaybackTony wrote: post #5

This is something I preach often, even at FAANG. Often engineers feel comfortable and in-the-zone when solving for a process. One saying I often delivery is: Engineers often think their job is to build things. That's not the whole story, they build things for _people_. Nobody cares what your code looks like. Nobody cares what your architecture looks like. As engineers we should worry about creating forgettable experi…

Good architecture leads to faster feature development and increased stability, which makes your users happy

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#22

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:35 PM UTC

PaybackTony wrote: post #5

This is something I preach often, even at FAANG. Often engineers feel comfortable and in-the-zone when solving for a process. One saying I often delivery is: Engineers often think their job is to build things. That's not the whole story, they build things for _people_. Nobody cares what your code looks like. Nobody cares what your architecture looks like. As engineers we should worry about creating forgettable experi…

[deleted]

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#23

Post by arcturus17 » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #18

bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

"It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone" I think that depends on the colo honestly. What is so unreliable about a single EC2 instance in a zone?

Yea I’m left scratching my head too. Is there really a difference in reliability between an EC2 instance and colocated hardware?

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#24

Post by Barrin92 » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

Very good post. A few years ago there was an interesting post linked here on HN about Stackoverflow's tech stack and I was surprised how simple it was. Basically a bunch of servers cache, load balancer, dotnet, sql. And in reality for most projects that is honestly just about what you need.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#25

Post by jayd16 » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

goodoldneon wrote: post #21

PaybackTony wrote: post #5

This is something I preach often, even at FAANG. Often engineers feel comfortable and in-the-zone when solving for a process. One saying I often delivery is: Engineers often think their job is to build things. That's not the whole story, they build things for _people_. Nobody cares what your code looks like. Nobody cares what your architecture looks like. As engineers we should worry about creating forgettable experi…

Good architecture leads to faster feature development and increased stability, which makes your users happy

The point is that is just one strategy not the goal.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#26

Post by neilv » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

> If we pick exotic technology, it’ll be harder to hire (and we won’t ship as much product).

If you need to do something that's not just generic CRUD app/site... picking an exotic technology that high-powered programmers love, might make it easier to hire.

Compare:

"We're building a gig economy app to clean gas station bathrooms, and we eat our own dogfood!"

to:

"We're USING RUST to build something (not a crypto scam, honest), and WE WILL PAY YOU MONEY TO HACK RUST, and did we mention RUST!!!"

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#27

Post by mrkurt » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:38 PM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #18

bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

"It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone" I think that depends on the colo honestly. What is so unreliable about a single EC2 instance in a zone?

Faster disks, no control plane to fail, simpler network, etc.

This isn't bias speaking, I work on Fly.io, our VMs are less reliable than EC2 VMs. AWS's pitch is that all the extra complexity in their infrastructure benefits you. So is ours! But it is, in fact, extra complexity that will bite you in the ass if you don't build your apps the right way.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#28

Post by mik3y » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

habitue wrote: post #9

> customers are not paying for, nor give a shit about, these things. Yes, but they do give a shit if: - your product is slow, so they assume it's crap and leave your site - your product breaks, no one notices or fixes it - your product is bad, because your wrote it in a safe boring technology like cobol and therefore couldn't access the best developers. (exaggeration, but variations on this are true) My point isn't t…

(author here - oh gee, hi hn!)

Yes, those things are always important (if not critical); it's not meant as a defense of bad architecture, merely to try to make those decisions through a product/customers-first lens.

(I did try to connect quality/reliablity, perhaps unsuccessfully, later in the post, e.g. in goals: "If the system is unreliable, we won’t ship as much product ... If we don’t replace this system, more and more customers will experience a broken product.")

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#29

Post by andrewmutz » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:39 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #11

> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will. It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center…

I think he literally means Joe's computer closet.

Colo is fine if you can set it up extremely quickly and it takes minimal ongoing support time. Depending on what you mean by Colo, that may or may not be possible.

Re: Your tech stack is not the product

#30

Post by barbazoo » Thu, Jan 12, 2023, 11:40 PM UTC

nfRfqX5n wrote: post #14

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but it would seem to me that the FAA NOTAM system had orders of magnitude more uptime than literally any product produced by so called "professional" "engineers" at big software companies.

AWS uptime is pretty insane

According to their own status page, yes